Why I feel AoW-PF is not the right direction

[Ramzeppelin]

So yes I am being "that person" and starting a new thread to voice a complaint. Please understand I try hard to not be that person generally. I feel this is my best hope for making this game better in the future as I LOVE this series and have played it since since the first one.

So what is my gripe?
My problem is this game feels like they are trying to turn it into a true 4x game. I thought I loved 4x games as once I heard the term I thought "ohh let me try other 4x games"...I did...They stunk....ALL of them stunk.
AoW should not be moving closer to Civ. or any of the other 4x games i've played. There are a few space 4x games that I may try, but they also focus on combat.

Who plays AoW to win by diplomacy? If you answer "I do"...then why are you playing AoW? Play a true 4x game as they blow AoW out of the water in that area.
NO, what AoW does is TURN BASED TACTICAL COMBAT!.....Yes.....TURN BASED TACTICAL COMBAT......

While I applaud the new interface....the other changes? Well so far they stink. OR if they do not stink, you know what, truly they are "shrug". If anyone is excited about the new zone stuff, well you and I are different big time.
This game was always about TURN BASED TACTICAL COMBAT, and never diplomacy or zones.

WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE
Is made the TURN BASED TACTICAL COMBAT even better. How? Well I'm tired of giving great ideas away for free so I will hold onto the best ideas and just a few lesser ones.

The weakness in AoW was the choice of race did not matter nearly as much as it should. I could start out as Halflings and end up with an army of basically every race....BOOO I say to that. Also, A druid was a druid and had the same druid abilities regardless of race.
We can quibble over details but let's face it, it is accurate to say the races were not different enough AT ALL.

Elves should have had a magic book that was very different from Dwarves...period. Now I love that you went interplanetary...WOOT!....Amazing new races WOOT! I love it....But instead of focusing on making the combat even better and making these great new races more distinct....You came up with zone crapola and made the spellbook into an even more generic less fun somehow...bleh. So I feel I got ripped off a bit. You are making the game shiny and worse in my view and I worry this will continue.

So I have decided your next game must have a demo or I will not buy it, UNLESS it advertises the correct changes in bold print. So in essence you lost a customer that bought this game without a thought. I never bothered to look up what this game even was...I LOVED Age of Wonders. Now I love AoW 1,2 and 3 and feel like I got snookered by paying 49.99 for a game that I would now knowing, would not pay more than 19.99 for, at most. Even then, probably only on sale.
I really do worry that this fancy new interface will send the wrong message. You will likely see and increase in revenue from your price tag giving you a very wrong impression.

This game should be leaning towards TURN BASED TACTICAL COMBAT games with extras, and NOT be leaning towards Fallen Enchantress of Civilization or some other such game.
Those are my 2 cents. I will give this game a fair shake...I hope you see the light as it were and realize you should be improving this games strengths and not bothering too much with things not to do with TURN BASED TACTICAL COMBAT.
I have some really cool ideas for this game that I am certain fans would love, that you could have done instead but I have had people make too much money off of my ideas in other things and I really should get paid for those ideas.
Tell you what....You hire me, and I will work for free until my ideas prove themselves, and then you can pay me.

Thank you for reading this and if I prove to be in the minority I will be surprised but hey, lately I have found the minority the only place for a intelligent person.
I do think however I could plan out a game to take your "audience" and maybe I will do just that if this game does not start moving in the correct direction. I am reasonably certain I can find the right small company that would be on board.
I say that not in a hostile way at all, I just mean if you do not want to play up what this game does best, someone else will.
Not sure why you would want to become a true 4x game, but if it makes you money, more power to you and I wish you the best.

I will say this however in parting....There are a lot of 4x games doing the same things pretty much....The market is starved of epic turn based tactical combat games done right. The closest I can think of is a particular Warhammer game on steam.
There are turn based games like Ogre tactics in concept, but only a tiny few that have the type of combat AoW has.....Why you do not expand that is beyond me.
People are too busy to play the games with 50 thousand troops although those games are amazing, but one that has 10 to 50 a side that is pick up and play....Well I hear players talk about this niche a lot, and there is nothing to fill that void.

AoW and a few others were it. Now AoW is seeming to slowly become more involved in the non combat aspects.....Well, that leaves the market wide open for the right game.
I hope you choose to go that route!

 

[Lord of Riva]

I for one, while planetfall hopefully only remains a detour to the sci-fi genre as i prefer the fantasy setting, think they moved in the right direction.

The tactical gameplay was incredible in AoW 3 and apart from some UI aspects i find unclear we have not lost that one bit in planetfall. However improving, and it's a big improvement, the Strategic layer of the game is a huge boon to the series.

 

[ashbery76]

After their best game and most successful release I think they are pretty happy with the direction.

See you back on the steam forums.

 

[Eji1700]

Tac battles are objectively better since choices actually matter more? Half of what you seem to be saying AoW should have done, PF did. Races/classes/magic no longer feel like light reskins for half the tree and are actually distinct and encourage different tactical strategy choices

 

[grandad1982]

Why I for one feel that using a coloured font and non standard font size is the wrong direction. Also the additon of ALL CAPS STATEMENTS DOESN'T HELP THE PRESENTATION OF YOU POST.

Plus your argument is stupid as is does have turn based combat. Pretty good combat too. The fact that the world map has some diplomacy now doesn't really detract from that, in fact doesn't having more options make for a better game.

In conclusion, never use large coloured font to write a wall of text on a forum again.

 

[Ethorin]

I like having quests that matter.

 

[TheDeadlyShoe]

why do you even care about the zones either way if its tactical combat you are concerned with

i mean the sectors system streamlines everything since you dont have to infinite city spam to compete

 

[Gaarq]

interesting, i used exclusively tactical mode combats only in AoW II. in AoW and AoW3, they were either underdeveloped or over-complicated, respectively. tactical mode in AoW PF seems to be a bit better than in AoW3, but still not as good as in AoW II, imho. what i really appreciate, in fact, is that other ways of communication work in-game

 

[Garresh]

... what? The combat is great. The only thing I see missing is some of the "wow" spells you saw in the last game. Stuff like the chaos warp terrain thing, or spells like Night wish.

But the chaos warp thing was dlc(and they have 3 planned! more content coming!), and now there's a goddamn spells that makes an entire stack invisible on the map for 2 turns.

So a lot of the spells that were situational but fun, and looked cool, have been shifted towards incredibly focused and strong spells. It's an interesting choice, but not unwelcome.

That being said, there's so much to go through I'm probably missing stuff. Really this game is excellent. Just give it time. The tech tree is dense, and a lot of things are not intuitively laid out. But the more you dig, the more gems you find.

Also, the tiers system has been flattened somewhat so there's no tier 4 spam anymore to my knowledge(I could be wrong though). So the combat honestly feels great to me. It's weird but I actually find my tier 1 units tend to last longer since heavy tanks can't use cover and are higher priority targets. Like my indentured will last all game, while my wraith tanks will take hits. It's all very nice because it means your unit options are exponentially increased from 3.

 

[CodingFox]

I for one have never played another AOW before, so while I can’t compare, I think Planetfall does it right. Why I would like to win via diplomatics? Because it’s an option! Because it sometimes may be the only working solution if other things fail. Options make games better. Especially if they are implemented in a meaningful way.

The argument that AOW is ment to be played exclusively for combat and is not like a civ game doesn’t count when the latest installment has all those civ content and options. The game is what it is with all its features and options.

Again, I can’t say anything about older installments and i understand the opinions if you are coming from those titles that where different in some or many ways. On the other hand it seems like Planetfall is a great success so far, so I estimate that it won’t be the only sci-fi title of the series

 

[Zenicetus]

That being said, there's so much to go through I'm probably missing stuff. Really this game is excellent. Just give it time. The tech tree is dense, and a lot of things are not intuitively laid out. But the more you dig, the more gems you find.

Agreed. The OP may not have spent enough time finding out how the tech tree works, and discovering synergies. That's more important this time around.

Also, the tiers system has been flattened somewhat so there's no tier 4 spam anymore to my knowledge(I could be wrong though). So the combat honestly feels great to me. It's weird but I actually find my tier 1 units tend to last longer since heavy tanks can't use cover and are higher priority targets. Like my indentured will last all game, while my wraith tanks will take hits. It's all very nice because it means your unit options are exponentially increased from 3.

Right, I remember one of the big complaints with AoW3 was that it was a simplistic beeline to Tier 4 armies, with no need to keep the early game units. I haven't spent enough time with Planetfall yet to get a feel for the end game, but so far it seems better balanced in that respect.

 

[Etrutian]

I think its a solid direction. I was honestly not a fan of previous iterations of the series because of FALLEN ENCHANTRESS, which I thought did everything slightly better.

With that, I very much enjoy the.... playability of this one. I am also quite interested in actually completing the campaign, for the first time since 2011.


slight recommendation; provide a TLDR

 

[Entherian]

oh my god i thought the forums were just taking forever to load and that's why the text was so big no he really did just write that all out with the size blown up manually wow

ahem

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I'm satisfied with most of the changes made in the transition from AoW3 to PF. The use of sectors is an interesting choice, but I respect it, and it doesn't negatively impact my play any. In fact, I'd argue that it improves over 3, where I consistently had issues with my cities being too close and their borders clashing and lowering my happiness. The races in PF aren't just distinct lore-wise, they also matter far more than in 3. Different races' units will have different abilities and functions within an army, unlike in 3 where you could pretty much swap any spearman with any other spearman, and they'd do more or less the same things. Secret tech also synergizes much more directly with race now, where instead of just getting new racial units of your class, you can upgrade your racial units to gain bonuses from or give bonuses to the things your secret tech does to enemies and each other. Tactical combat is vastly improved now that spells aren't so game-changing, and units have the ability to use and destroy cover with abilities and attacks.

And so on and so on, as others have said.

 

[Lord Lambert]

Thank you for reading this and if I prove to be in the minority I will be surprised

lol. I take it your surprise is overwhelming right now then, huh?

 

[rhaak]

Thank you for reading this and if I prove to be in the minority I will be surprised but hey, lately I have found the minority the only place for a intelligent person.!

Wow, passive-aggressive and condescending. You must be very smart.

 

[Nereid]

I totally disagree with the creator of this thread. Planetfall is a step in the right direction.

My only complaints would be the a bit underwhelming AI and still just okayish diplomacy.

 

[Ethorin]

melee AI is WAAAAAAY too dumb, at the very least it should be trying to get units around or sending in weaker dudes first to soak fire, slowly inching my gunline forward is far too effective and not even deploying Ops get's the AI to move.

that's my only complaint right now.

 

[Qoojo]

Wow, passive-aggressive and condescending. You must be very smart.

Of course, only "intelligent" people agree.

You knew the post was going to be special with the larger font and when the poster spent the first paragraph talking describing that the post is a complaint, then the complaint is "I don't like 4x games. Gimme more tactical combat."

 

[Rubella]

I haven't played the previous AoW despite having the last one sitting firmly in my Steam library. This iteration caught my fancy after I watched a few streams and playing it myself, I can only say that buying it was a great decision. I'm enjoying myself so far. That's actually all that matters.

 

[Garresh]

Why is everyone being so rude?